It is vital for a business entity to monitor the activity and work product of researchers and others involved in the development of products or services associated with the business entity. For example, intellectual property professionals, such a corporate legal counsel, are tasked with the responsibility of invention scanning. Invention scanning is a process in which corporate intellectual property professionals meets with technical leaders and innovators on a regular basis to assess and guide innovation activities to support the overall corporate intellectual property strategy. Further, the amount and quality of innovative activity is often a measure of an inventor's or innovator's productivity. Therefore, invention scanning also involves a review and analysis of innovative activity.
Unfortunately, there are inherent problems associated with invention scanning as currently practiced. For example, invention scanning often requires extensive travel and time commitments on the part of intellectual property professionals and the participation of large number of personnel, which drains corporations of time, money, and resources. Further, most intellectual property professionals do not have the time to perform detailed analysis of areas of inventive or innovative activity, to monitor, in detail, the activities of inventors or innovators, or to meet regularly with inventors or innovators, since intellectual property professionals are often highly leveraged by other high priority activities and such analysis and meetings require extensive time commitments and travel. Consequently, innovators and inventors often send disclosures to intellectual property professionals in lieu of meetings, leaving intellectual property professionals to collate and review such documentation. This process severely limits the ability of intellectual property professionals to accurately guide the patent decision process in a timely manner.
Thus, there has been a long felt need for a process that would automatically cluster the work product of researchers and others involved in the development of products or services into easily understood and reviewed concept spaces and graphical representations that would enable a rapid, accurate, and focused analysis of the work product, providing actionable business intelligence. There also is a long-felt need to enable drilling into areas of interest across an enterprise, analyzing activity by in-common technical or business concepts. There is a further long-felt need to measure and monitor the productivity of inventors and innovators.